2012 in review: Which tech companies triumphed, and which ones tanked?

2012 was a somewhat predictable year in the technology industry — mostly, the companies that did well in 2011 continued to do well while the companies that earned reputations as walking calamities didn’t do much to change perceptions. Even so, it’s good to take a look back at the winners and losers in the tech industry every year so we can get a sense of where the market may be headed in the future. So without further ado, here are the companies that had the best and worst years in 2012.

The Winners

Apple (AAPL): When the worst thing you’ve done all year is to release a shoddy Maps application, you’ve done pretty well for yourself.

Looking toward the future, Samsung seems poised to become the first manufacturer to release a smartphone with a flexible display, which will give it a key innovation it can use to differentiate itself from Apple.

Google (GOOG): Remember when Google used to be a search company? Well those days are long, long over.

Things got so bad for HTC that at one point its total revenues declined by 19% between September and October this year, a stunning decline over a period where smartphone revenues tend to be stronger than the norm.

What’s truly remarkable about HP is that it’s still cleaning up the mess left behind by former CEO Léo Apotheker, whose catastrophic, Caligula-like reign at HP could have only been worse if he’d appointed a horse to be his COO. (Or who knows, maybe that would have been an improvement?)

Apotheker’s big parting gift to HP before he was fired in 2011 was the acquisition of enterprise IT software firm Autonomy, a company that current HP CEO Meg Whitman accused of massive accounting fraud in the months leading up to the companies’ merger. Even if Autonomy turns out to be innocent of these particular charges, the decision to buy the company still resulted in HP writing off $8 billion, just months after the company had to write off nearly $9 billion related to its 2008 acquisition of Electronic Data Systems.

All we can say about Meg Whitman’s decision to take over this company is that she must have a penchant for executive-grade masochism — recall that before coming to HP, she tried to run for governor of California, whose state government is one of the few institutions more dysfunctional than her current employer.